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116 welcome wherever you go.” Or, if the number of chapters happened to be small, “Baird’s Manual” was referred to again. “Only fifteen chapters, you see. We don’t take in new chapters every time they ask. We ’re darned careful to know what we ’re signing up before we take anybody in.” The word “aristocratic” was carefully avoided, but it was just as carefully suggested.

It seemed to Hugh that he was shown a photo¬ graph of every fraternity house in the country.; “Look,” he would be told by his host, “look at that picture to the right of the fireplace. That’s our house at Cornell. Isn’t it the darb? And look at that one. It’s our house at California. Some palace. They’ve got sunken gardens. I was out there last year to our convention. The boys cer¬ tainly gave us a swell time.”

All this through a haze of tobacco smoke and over the noise of a jazz orchestra and the chatter of a dozen similar conversations. Hugh was ex¬ cited but not really interested. The Nu Deltas in-3 vited him to their house every evening, but they were not making a great fuss over him. Perhaps they were n’t going to give him a bid. , . . Well, he’d go some other fraternity. No, he would n’t, either. Maybe the Nu Deltas would bid him later after he ’d done something on the track.

Although actual pledging was not supposed to be done until Saturday night, Hugh was receiving what